A Short, Sharp Shock

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Book Overview

A man tumbles through wild surf, half drowned, and collapses on a moonlit beach. When he regains consciousness, he has no memory of who he is or where he came from. He knows only that the woman who... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553574612
• ISBN13: 9780553574616
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: Bantam
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.9" x 0.4" x 4.2"

Customer Reviews

A complex book, but NOT difficult or bad fiction!

"A Short Sharp Shock" is a complex book, but it isn't as difficult to understand as some reviewers have made out. This novel is a story about a man and his journey to rediscover his past and the identity of a girl; a common enough theme. This strange world and the characters inhabiting it are painstakingly constructed by Kim Stanley Robinson to explore thoughts on chaos, dreams, memory, history, and love. Basically, what is it that makes us human? Pay special attention to the different creation myths told over various campfires throughout the book; since the author "created" the world, these myths explain what he was trying to accomplish with this novel.Throughout the novel the reader is asked what makes us human and what makes us unique individuals? Is it our genetic make up? Our dreams? Our memories? Our biochemical construction? Our capacity to love? And, interestingly, is it our connection to the past, to our ancestors? I finished this book in a day but I thought the novel was just long enough for Kim Stanley Robinson to cover all the points he wanted to, especially when you consider how intricately detailed each scene is described. If it were longer one could get bored, and his intent wasn't to create a rich fantasy world to escape to and to explore, but to create a world in which to explore questions of existentialism. There are, however, a number of inconsistencies in the narrative, I would be interested in finding out if they are deliberate literary devices or oversights stemming from impatience in going to press.

A Kafkaish Gulliver's Travels

I read red-green-blue mars and I put it in the category of big fat sci-fi series suitable for very long airplane trips. I love sci-fi but rgb got pretty boring by the time blue was published. I got the distinct impression that Robinson wished he could finish his contract and get on with writing something important. I think that SSS may be that book.Short, Sharp Shock is a great book but if you didn't like Kafka, you couldn't plough through all of Gulliver's Travels, and you think that Jean Paul Sartre is an idiot then you will probably have difficulty with SSS. One of the other reviews refered to the forced style of the prose -- sometimes it is, just like Swift, Robinson occasionally falls into the trap, for a few pages, of trying to "tell us something". But apart from these occasional pedantic lapses the book is profound.Robinson successfully explores the temporal nature of personal existance. "It might be that events more than a few months gone would always be nothing more than broken and fleeting images, images like those that fled from the mind each morning upon waking, fragments of dreams too powerful to face. The past was a dream." The past is nothing but a dream state, a memory that becomes less and less relevant to the present. What Robinson's principal character discovers about the intrinsically uncertain future follows from his discovery that he doesn't need his past.It's an existential, meaningful, very symbolic book. Unless you classify Kafka as scifi then it isn't scifi and it certainly isn't rgb. I loved SSS and plan to read it again soon.

Utterly engrossing and philosophical

This book, which other reviewers have described well, was totally enthralling and absorbing. After finishing it, my perceptions of reality had changed, and it took a while before I was able to relate to the real world again! Robinson's writing in this work, more than most of his other novels, is artistic and literary, almost Kafka-esque. I would compare A Short, Sharp Shock to a similar book, also a surrealistic fantasy written by an SF author, The Bridge, by Iain Banks. Aside from their superficial similarities (fish-out-of-water protagonist traveling on a trip of land/bridge on an endless sea), both are astonishingly thought-provoking and deep. Very highly recommended for those willing to challenge themselves.

Mysterious, captivating, and ultimately mind-boggling...

"A Short, Sharp Shock" is quite different from any of Robinson's novels, or for that matter from any of his short stories that I remember. It's as good as anything else he's written, but in a totally different direction.Robinson creates a world of mythology, of peculiar yet compelling visions. The story can only be said to be elliptical, orbiting far out into mysterious lands and lives, before hurtling back to its starting point in a particularly thought-provoking way. If all this sounds vague and atmospheric, I'm sorry, but this is not the kind of book that can be described by simply condensing its plot.That plot focuses on an amnesiac character who finds himself abruptly thrust into a peculiar world, a thin strip of land surrounded by an untravelled ocean. As he travels along through this evocative landscape, he interacts with a cast of memorable persons most of whom are not clearly friends nor enemies, but all of whom provoke some kind of response in the protagonist (and in the reader). The meaning of this journey starts out simple -- a search for someone who might be his partner, and who was kidnapped by a band of local thugs -- and with every page, it becomes more complex. By the end, the journey has become a metaphorical strand tying together cosmology, love and hate, cultural diversity, parallel universes, the unrecoverable loss of memories, and I don't know what all else.No review can adequately describe this story; it's too complicated and yet too simple. I *wholeheartedly* recommend it.

Wow...I mean...Wow

This is Robinson like you've never seen him. I guess I COULD compare it to his Mars trilogy, Ice Henge, or Antarctica, but it's really unlike them. However, it ranks up there with his very best works.As usual, his character development is incredible. The description of the Fantasy world he creates is amazing. I finished it in one sitting, though I thought about it for the next week.The novel's strength lies in its inner meaning. Read for face value, it's a decent novel though extremely confusing. Read with some thought and reflection, it can be seen in many different lights, such as the circle of a human life, relationships, histories...the list goes on.Truly a remarkable novel, but don't read it if you just want a light, fun read (like Dune or Grisham novels).